Official llvm/clang package for PyPI?

[LecrisUT]

There are so many llvm/clang related projects on PyPI, most of which are not up to date. What are the plans for an official packaging and distribution? What are the roadblocks and challenges for tackling this issue?

[nightlark]

Getting up-to-date clang bindings packaged on PyPI is something I'm also interested in figuring out. I opened a PR that adds some files needed to create a sdist tarball and wheel that can be uploaded to PyPI as a first step. If that looks okay, my plan is to add a workflow that automatically handles releasing a new version on PyPI when LLVM releases a new version.

Probably the main challenge I see will be figuring out what name it gets released under on PyPI, as out of date packages already exist that use the most obvious names (clang and libclang). I've reached out to the current maintainer of the PyPI clang package to see if they'd be willing to add another maintainer with an eventual goal of getting it moved to the LLVM organization if/when the packaging files and workflows needed are accepted in this repository. If they are completely inactive on GitHub and never reply then the process of getting a package name will be much slower.

[LecrisUT]

Nice, that's a step forward. That would handle the pure-python part. Btw, look into lit subproject and try to modernise it and unify the workflows.

The more difficult part is providing a compiled wheel of the llvm project. Do you fancy tackling that? I can help review and discuss it. The tools you would need are scikit-build-core and a pyproject.toml on each subfolder. As far as I navigated, each subproject seems like it should be standalone buildable, but double check the dependencies and try it out on the subproject with no dependencies.

[nightlark]

Btw, look into lit subproject and try to modernise it and unify the workflows.

I took a quick look -- definitely some things that could be moved over to pyproject.toml and perhaps make use of setuptools_scm to avoid a hardcoded version number that needs manual updating.

The more difficult part is providing a compiled wheel of the llvm project. Do you fancy tackling that? I can help review and discuss it. The tools you would need are scikit-build-core and a pyproject.toml on each subfolder. As far as I navigated, each subproject seems like it should be standalone buildable, but double check the dependencies and try it out on the subproject with no dependencies.

Do you mean a compiled wheel of the llvm project for the libclang shared library, or also compiled wheels for other llvm tools such as clang-format, clang-tidy, etc? I have a fork of the current libclang PyPI package that I migrated over to using scikit-build-core and a pyproject.toml file, and cibuildwheel for managing the wheel builds across multiple platforms -- I think it could be adapted to work in the llvm repo (which would also simplify some aspects of the implementation).

[LecrisUT]

Step-by-step. clang and libclang first to have a reference, make sure it can recompile from sdist, etc. Then try to separate llvm dependency, then the tools.

There are 2 models that could be adapted depending on how much the developers want to support this:

• integrate inside the llvm repo
• how cmake pypi is distributed and kept in sync (just a wrapper around FetchContent workflow)

The main thing though is getting a seal of approval so that users, developers, contributors know which project to turn to, which project name to use in their dependencies, etc.